Moving Still | Still Moving starts from the premise that nothing is static and that any change bears consequences. The works included in this exhibition are an invitation to meditate on the transformations that take place around us. While Andréanne Michon’s video reminds of the profound impact of human intervention on the environment, billions of years after their disappearance Caroline Cloutier maps the placement of the stars in architectural drawings that carry the sentiment that what we see is sometimes only the representation of an anachronistic present.

Our eyes regularly fool us into believing that things are immobile. Many works included in this exhibition will undergo a physical alteration over the duration of six weeks: some will grow and others will decay. But what bring all of them together are an intelligent consideration of a world in constant mutation and the recognition of the ephemeral nature of all things.

From the roof of his Brooklyn studio on September 11, 2001, William Basinski filmed the last hour of sunlight and the clouds of smoke that plumed over lower Manhattan. The soundtrack that accompanies these tragic images, a sort of haunted iteration, changes with each repetition and eventually dissolves into complete silence. Disintegration Loops is a slow decline into a visual and aural blackout. Over the course of an hour, Basinski leaves us reflecting on the ramifications of a day that ended like any other— with a sunset, but its impact continues to resonate nearly two decades later.

A plane crash, we are told, happens quickly. Passengers might not have time to fully comprehend their tragic fate before they encounter their demise. Jonathan Schipper has slowed things down. His Model of Slow Motion Plane Crash takes place over six weeks, leaving enough time to reflect on the many things that might have gone wrong. Some changes happen abruptly: accidents or deaths for instance, but most tragedies unfold in a more subtle manner. On environmental, political and cultural levels, for instance, things often develop in silence.

The thirteen artists invited to participate to this exhibition wish to record the passage of time, they are receptive to change. Their work testifies to a world in constant flux and to the incremental movement of permutation. Some of the deepest transformations are neither audible nor visible, but they alter our world in profound ways.

A Boy Scout smears lipstick across his mouth, his lips and skin all the same. A girl wears a feathered headdress, a cigarette between her fingers and a bottle of booze in her hands. These scenes, which suggest that the kids are not alright, are two of the life-sized photographs in Jonathan Hobin's new photo series Cry Babies.

Bright and exceptionally detailed, Cry Babies challenges colloquial representations of childhood. Hobin's earlier series In the Playroom (2010) suggested a loss of childhood innocence through exposure to mass media reports of the violent power play of adults. Cry Babies puts childhood itself in the spotlight. But not as an innocent victim. Here it is complex, challenging, dark and troubling.

Philippe Ariès' seminal 1960 Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life traces the development of a western concept of childhood and argues that it was only discovered in the 17th century. In the middle ages, it didn't exist. Helen Schwartzman expands on this in her chapter “The Invention of Childhood”: “All children, because of the fact that they are born into a social environment, are affected by a construct that is peculiarly historical and, as such, has undergone many changes and reinterpretations in all societies.”

Hobin's practice reveals these constructs. He creates arresting images that challenge stereotypes and engage with taboos. Rooted in storytelling, his work takes visual cues from popular culture, historical references, cinema and literature. What he produces are contemporary tableaux vivants.

Gender, puberty, Neverland and the struggle to grow up, war and violence, religion, racial stereotypes, physical illnesses - the sixteen photos arranged in eight pairs of two address the dissonances in the choreography of childhood. Presented as photo diptychs that appear as images within lockets and “living” video portraits, Cry Babies exposes the contradictions and artifice rooted in Victorian era beliefs that continue to inform idealized representations of childhood in popular culture today. A locket is a way to wear an image close to one's heart. They are romantic, sweet keepsakes and gifts, tidy compartments for memories. Hobin appropriates this as the format for his diptychs, suggesting dark secrets that are carefully kept tucked away.

Cry Babies calls out the bluff of candy-coated images of childhood. To suggest that childhood is only sugar and spice and everything nice is to engage in an adult game of make-believe.

Henri Venne Resurfacing

May 2 - Jun 20, 2015 Reception: Sat May 2 3pm - 5pm

Reminiscent of minimalist abstract painting, the Resurfacing photographs capture the in-between moment of remembering and forgetting.

Dazibao presents an exposition marking the twenty-five-year video-making career of Chantal duPont. Eleven videos, made between 1990 and 2015, have been selected with a great deal of freedom and assembled according to their connecting ideas rather than chronologically. This two-hour screening highlights some of the many facets of the artist’s career.

Through her work as a teacher, at times even a mentor, Chantal duPont has been involved in every stage in the development of video art and latterly digital art in Montreal, with respect to both content and the emergence of networks for research and dissemination. She contributes to the work of numerous institutions, artist-run centres and research groups such as Vidéographe, the CIAM, Hexagram, La Centrale, Studio XX and the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, to name just a few. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherche en Arts médiatiques, she heads up the inter-university research project Nouvelles formes narratives et création audio-vidéo and contributed to the first Quebec dictionary of media art, edited by Louise Poissant and published in 1996.

The question of territorial identity and its boundaries, in particular the boundaries between different artistic fields and between nature and culture and public and private, runs through duPont’s entire artistic output. Her videos take up family and cultural identity and the vulnerability of the body and of memory through self-representation, performance and writing. In the past few years she has developed a special interest in the various forms of narrative which can give rise to a movement between reality and fiction introduced by digital culture.

In order to add other voices to the mix and bring new ideas to our reading of duPont’s work while providing context for it, with the precious help of GIV (Anne Golden) and Vidéographe (Denis Vaillancourt) we have assembled a complementary program of work by Laetitia Bourget, Belinda Campbell, Bertrand R. Pitt, Victoria Stanton, Lisa Steele and Esther Valiquette.

Chantal duPont studied initially at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal before completing a Master’s Degree at Concordia University. She taught in the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of the Université du Québec à Montréal from 1985 to 2008. A multidisciplinary artist whose work has won awards at numerous video festivals in Belgium, Colombia, France and Portugal, her local awards include the 2001 Prix à la Création artistique of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for Du front tout le tour de la tête. In 2006, she won the Bell Canada Award in Video Art, awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, for her exceptional contribution to video art. Her work over the past thirty years and more has also been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, including most recently at the cultural centre of the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil, 2014), at Montreal’s International Digital Arts Biennial (2012), at OBORO (2012), at the Kunstpavillion (Innsbruck, Austria, 2009) and at Vtape (Toronto, 2007).

Almost Six Pieces brings together, for the first time in Canada, five video installations by the American artist Reynold Reynolds. In a scrupulously controlled chaos, exacerbated by the abundance of references—historical, artistic, scientific, etc.—Reynolds somehow develops an aesthetic of “unease”. This unease is maintained by a persistent confusion between bluff and reality and is fed by unexpressed and unacknowledged torments. Without being apocalyptic or completely dystopian, the five works brought together here foretell a world bordering on disaster, making the very idea of progress the allegory of ruin.

Seven Days ’Til Sunday forms a triptych with Burn and The Drowning Room, all of them made with Patrick Jolley (1964-2012). One by one, as if pushed by an implacable force, human forms fall down a staircase or from the top of a grain silo, are burned or explode, are thrown into water from a bridge. An inert body is also perched on the subway platform of a hallucinatory city. The soundtrack, the use of black and white and the slow-motion effects make us expect something that has already happened, magnifying the anguish.

In Burn, an apartment and its residents, while tending to their everyday lives, waste away in a state of disturbing latency. In this closed world in which living resembles a punishment, a man sprinkles gasoline on the duvet and bed where his wife is sleeping, sets it on fire and then immolates himself, without being burned. For the viewer, the bewildering apathy of the characters appears as the only possible form of revolt.

In Six Apartments, the residents of six dwellings live out their solitary lives while voices on the radio and television deliver in polite tones alarming news of the imminent destruction of the planet. The text permeates the image, rendering it ambiguous and metaphorical. At times using the camera in a stoic and almost medical manner, Reynolds accentuates and even aestheticises, through a perfect loop, the alteration and degeneration that take place over the course of the film, to the point that the resulting sense of suffocation becomes spellbinding.

In the succeeding works, Secrets Trilogy (made up of Secret Life, Secret Machine and Six Easy Pieces) and the quite recent One Part Seven, Reynolds explores the connections between art and science. Through the metaphor of time and its measurement, of its role in research and experimentation, movement and the moving image, he reveals and conceals by turns the various forms of mathematical elements or illusion that underlie any representation through images.

Born in Alaska, Reynold Reynolds holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been the subject of exhibitions around the world at venues such as the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), MoMA PS1 (New York), the Centre de la photographie (Geneva), the Christopher Grimes Gallery (California) and the Museu de Arte Moderna (Rio de Janeiro). His work has been shown in several biennials, including the Biennale of Moving Images (Geneva), the Berlin Biennale, the Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo del Fin del Mundo (Argentina) and the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The Drowning Room, presented in the exhibition Home Sweet Home. À propos de l’inquiétude (the exhibition inaugurating Dazibao’s new space) was our first exploration of his work. For more information see his website (artstudioreynolds.com). Reynolds has made several works with Patrick Jolley.

Vtape Special

Apr 30 - Jun 20, 2015 Reception: Thu Apr 30 7pm - 11pm

Dazibao in association with Vtape presents a selection of works from the catalogue of the leading video distributor in Canada.

In A Lecture on Art, Nelson Henricks employs the medium of video to conjure the voice of Oscar Wilde and to examine the place of æsthetics in art. Through this means, Henricks also reflects on what it means to record and reproduce sound.

A musician, writer, curator and artist, Henricks has exhibited worldwide. His writings have been published in exhibition catalogues, magazines, and in several anthologies. He is currently completing a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | Immatériel centres on four videos and one film by the late Korean American intermedia artist and writer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. These include Secret Spill (1974), Mouth to Mouth (1975), Vidéoème (1976), Re Dis Appearing (1977), and Permutations (1976). Produced between 1974 and 1977, these videos can be situated alongside the earliest conceptual and intermedia video practice experiments by artists in the US, Canada and internationally, demonstrating her core commitments to the materiality of language and media forms, subjectivity, embodiment and memory.

In addition to the five videos that will play continuously in the exhibition space, selected visual and textual elements from the Berkeley Art Museum’s online Cha Collection are reproduced and exhibited to supplement viewing; Cha’s artworks and archives are housed in the Museum's Conceptual Art Study Centre. These accompanying elements explore the ephemerality and immateriality that permeate Cha’s artworks and writings, introducing viewers to the intermedia dimensions of her practice – the relation between different media that seem to evade categorization. Highlighting these cross-overs of form, theorist Trinh T .Minh-ha refers to Cha’s moving image practice as creating a ‘page-screen’; other commentators address the ‘cinematic’ quality of her writing, especially in her experimental novel, Dictée (1982) for which she is widely known in literary contexts. The exhibition also highlights the multilingual aspects of her work — English, French, Korean – in the bilingual context of Montreal; this is the first time that Cha’s work will be exhibited in Montreal.

A performance-reading-tribute to Theresa Cha, involving poets, scholars and artists is planned for late March to accompany the exhibition.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) was an intermedia artist and writer, working in video, film, performance, poetry and other intermedia. Her experimental novel Dictée (1982) for which she is best known, has been published continuously since its original publication. Her traveling retrospective, Dream of the Audience was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001. Her three-channel video installation, Passages Paysages (1978) and single-channel videos were exhibited in the traveling group show, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution from 2007–2009.

Curator Monika Kin Gagnon has been researching and writing on the digital archives and Cha’s intermedia artworks and writings since 2009. She is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is the co-editor of the recent Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s UP 2014). For more on Cha see her online essay “Communicating the Intermedia Archive: The Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection” dnaanthology.com/anvc/dna/communicating-the-intermedia-archive-the-theresa-hak-kyung-cha-collection.)

Monika Kin Gagnon and DHC/ART wish to thank UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and SSHRC for their support of this project.

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art presents Pièces de résistance, the first major solo exhibition in Canada by British artist Yinka Shonibare MBE. Born in London of Nigerian heritage, Shonibare moved to Lagos, Nigeria with his family at age three, returning to Britain later to study art. His work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe in such notable contexts as Documenta 10 and the 52nd Biennale di Venezia. This survey exhibition will present seminal and more recent artworks across painting, photo, film, and sculpture.

Shonibare has become known worldwide for his use of Dutch-wax fabric as a conceptual and formal device in all of his work. While stereotypically associated with Africa, the origins of Dutch-wax fabric are actually found in Indonesian batik techniques, which were then industrialized and appropriated by European interests. With its mixed and mistaken provenances, Dutch-wax fabric provides a sumptuous yet probing vehicle to evoke the complexity of concepts such as identity, authenticity, ethnicity, representation, hybridity, race, class, migration, globalization, and power.

Yinka Shonibare MBE employs a multiplicity of strategies, including auto-ethnography and humour in combination with art historical and literary references, to deliver a body of work that is simultaneously seductive and subversive. His critical reflection on power relations between Africa and Europe is delivered through a formal treatment that is both lavish and decadent. In a related area of investigation, he reveals his affection and respect for British culture and institutions while simultaneously questioning class and privilege. It is this ambivalence that most productively unsettles simple binaries and reveals the intricacies involved in negotiating his subject matter.

In 2005, Shonibare was awarded the decoration of Member of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” (MBE). While other Black British artists have turned down this distinction, this acronym has been officially added to his professional name as it underscores the tensions that emerge through his work in regards to the experience of being at once inside and outside, of belonging and of marginalization.

Montreal is not only a site of cultural, historical, social, and political confluences, but also a city of excess that indulges in and celebrates fashion, jazz, and good times. As a result, it provides a provocative and irresistible context for the rich and fascinating body of work presented in Pièces de résistance. DHC/ART wishes to thank James Cohan Gallery, the Shonibare Studio, and the museums and collectors who have helped make this exhibition a reality.

Yinka Shonibare MBE was a Turner Prize nominee in 2004. A major mid-career survey toured from 2008–09 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. In 2011, the artist’s sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was selected for the prestigious Fourth Plinth commission series in London’s Trafalgar Square. In 2013, a major survey show was mounted at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK, and travelled in part to Royal Museums Greenwich/The Queen’s House, London, UK; GL Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark; Gdańska Galeria Miejska, Gdansk, Poland; and Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw, Poland. Shonibare lives and works in London.

March 14 to April 18, 2015
Vernissage: March 14, 3pm - 5pm with the artist present.

Instants, maybe
In the second phase of his 2014-2015 solo project at Gallery Hugues Charbonneau, Alain Paiement delves deep into the imposing photo bank that represents all the images he has captured throughout his thirty-year career, but which until now have almost never been put to use.
The artist states, “Basically, I’ve always ‘taken’ photos. I find photographic subjects wherever I go. There are hundreds. They are captured instantly, usually with hand held camera and no tripod.”
Alain Paiement is redefining the temporality of his “snapshots,” a term that usually suggests spontaneity and immediacy, in opposition to premeditated staging. Yet, by rigorous technical manipulation of the image, each work in this series combines several individual photographs. As a result we see multiple realities, ‘images of images’, obtained through overlay, juxtaposition, collage and other ways of stitching moments together.
This series embodies Paiement’s most recent research: it situates his increasing interest in the notion of time by bringing together different temporalities within his creative process (recent manipulations of old photographs, for example). These works reflect on the instantaneous nature of contemporary culture and the importance of the present in linking society to its past and to its immanent future.
Alain Paiement
Alain Paiement has been a key figure in contemporary Canadian photography. He researches the possibilities of how photography unfolds through time and space and translates this into images. Through installation, photo series, and video, Paiement experiments with perspective, telescopic views and lenses, as well as scanning, to explore the constantly changing relationship between the subject, its gaze and its environment.
Paiement’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions since the 1980s throughout Canada and the United States, but also in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. His work has frequently featured in exhibition catalogues, monographs and articles in various media and specialised journals. He has also realised many public art works, notably Tessellations sans fin (2012) at the CHUM Research Centre in Montreal. Paiement’s work is held in major public and private collections in Canada, the United States, Spain and Belgium.

The paintings in Glacial are the first works of the multimedia series Mapping Time, which explores imagery from my residency in the North with the Canadian Forces Artists Program.

In August 2013 I travelled extensively in Northern Canada and the High Arctic with the Canadian Forces. My work during these travels involved aerial photography and video of many areas first photographed by Royal Canadian Air Force Photo Squadrons in the early post World War II period. My father flew with them for several years. These Squadrons provided the photographs for the first accurate mapping of the North, needed for Northern defence and military installations such as the DEW Line. The millions of photographs used for these maps are archived at the National Air Photo Library, where I researched early flight lines and images. I was very fortunate to fly over and photograph many of the same locations documented in the NAPL holdings.
In juxtaposing my recent images to the historical photographs I am searching for traces of change, from glaciers in the Yukon, to ice patterns in the Northwest Passage, to human settlements and activities, in extreme and unpredictable terrain now affected by global warming.
The early period that has inspired this work was one of world-wide geopolitical and ideological developments, leading to the Cold War and to harsh policies often acted out on the lives of Northern peoples here in Canada, as in Resolute Bay. Present day pressures over sovereignty and resource exploitation, combined with the forces of climate change that are most damaging in the circumpolar regions, are deeply disturbing. Issues of displacement, refuge and survival, fragility and resilience, of places and peoples, have become ever more critical to my exploration of our relationship to the earth.

Biography

Leslie Reid's work has long explored the perceptual and psychological sensations evoked by the experience of a particular place. Her paintings, and more recently videos, bring together the sensory effects of light and space with the lived history of that place, most often in landscape, and at times through images of family, and touch on those feelings of danger, refuge and survival that reside there.

Her work was exhibited in 2012-13 in Builders: The Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2011 the retrospective Leslie Reid: A Darkening Vision was held at the Carleton University Art Gallery. This exhibition, curated by former Director Diana Nemiroff, featured paintings from 1975 to the present, as well as new ventures in video.

Leslie Reid is Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Ottawa.

Exposing Resource Ecologies brings together seven works produced by World of Matter, an international art and media project investigating primary materials and the complex ecologies in which they are embedded. Initiated by an interdisciplinary group of visual practitioners and theorists, World of Matter responds to the urgent need for new forms of representation that shift resource-related debates from a market driven domain to open platforms for engaged public discourse.

Ten collaborators have developed visual projects that are the result of long-term investigative fieldwork of the interconnected extractive ecologies at play in particular sites around the world, as well as their multifaceted impact on human and non-human lives and systems. Videos, interviews, testimonies and narratives, documents, maps and texts are configured as installations in the gallery space and form a complex interaction of critical documentary analysis and speculations addressing our relationship to (and definitions of) nature.

With the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Canada Council for the Arts, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and Pro Helvetia.

This exhibition is part of the Montreal Digital Spring 2015.

For more information on the exhibition and related events, visit our website:
ellengallery.concordia.ca

This symposium asks how the fields of contemporary art and media studies, indigenous studies and resistance movements, critical environmental studies, new ethnography and science and technology studies might bring into focus the globalizing dynamics of extractive ecologies. It seeks to build substantive discursive grounds for resisting incursions into sovereign land, denials of the rights of nature, and the persistent dispossession of indigenous and First Nation peoples.

For more information on the symposium programme:
events.worldofmatter.net